he last stage of my bachelor degree’s trajectory was the internship. I chose to join Bivolino for 3 months (and 3 extra months summer job) and ended up working on their new Bivolino Services project.
On Christmas 2008 I came back to the light of Western Europe (seeing the sun after 6 weeks was kind of strange), completely disillusioned and back with my 2 feet on the ground. I had an internship coming up in 3 months, and I went on looking for a company that would suit me well. Finally, I ended up at Bivolino, which was quite an experience, now that I look back on it. Bivolino is an online retailer, selling custom made shirts through their e-commerce platform. With patented technology they can provide made to measure shirts without even physically taking the customer’s sizes. When I arrived, they were in the first stage of renewing their shirt configurator. It ended up with me closely cooperating with Cedric Vanaken, PhD. student at EDM, researching the possibilities of integrating Image Based Rendered footage in a web application. I developed the workflow of acquiring the digital assets required to render the images needed for the web app. Next to that I prepared a simulation of the configurator that we used to do usability testing.
Although I worked closely with an academic institute like EDM, that wasn’t the part of my internship that taught me the most. It was being the communicative link between a technical development team and my bosses, being complete digital illiterates. Sometimes it proved to be difficult to explain something seemingly easy to people who barely know the difference between Powerpoint and Excel, which made me sort of an interpreter over time.